Data Breaches

Speaking for the first time since his retirement, former Genearl Keith Alexander says the government will not turn away from aggressively pursuing cybercrime and potential terrorist activity against the U.S.

Basic lapses in vulnerability and patch management are causing costly infections that impact the bottom line at organizations, according to the NTT Group study, which examined log, event, attack, incident and vulnerability data from its 6,000 clients globally. One firm suffered $196,000 in direct data breach costs as the result of a simple error and no system monitoring.

FireEye Partners and security experts in the channel say their clients are increasingly monitoring network logs and security alerts generated by their systems, but many businesses fail to address incident response after deploying network security appliances.

Zeus, Gameover and other banking Trojans are designed to steal account credentials, spoof web pages and manipulate transactions to drain accounts. As defenses have improved, the cybercriminal gangs behind the threats have increased their sophistication. Here are eight of the most notorious families.

FBI Director James Comey, said the FBI is working diligently to track down cybercriminals and provide actionable information to breach victims. Everyone should be suspicious of government power, but the FBI and the private sector must use all reasonable tools and authorities to stop malicious activities, Comey said.

Speaking to attendees at the 2014 RSA Conference in San Francisco, Art Coviello, executive vice president of EMC and executive chairman of RSA, defended his company's use of a flawed encryption algorithm with alleged links to the intelligence community.